For Gen, Alexander Chee talks with Cathy Park Hong about her book Minor Feelings, racial triangulation, and anti-Asian discrimination. Hong sees her book as a “very subjective portrait of an artist as an Asian American,” and reflects: “I also think that there were a lot of thorny subjects that I just touched upon, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. And I think I’ll probably delve deeper into that. What form it’s going to take, I don’t know. Americans are not really ready to look at race; they can only look at race in these basic building blocks.”
The New Yorker has announced a new live series that is free for subscribers. The first episode, on March 29, will be a discussion between poet Amanda Gorman, playwright Jeremy O. Harris, and writer Lauren Michele Jackson.
Today at 2 PM on Clubhouse, Bina Venkataraman, Kimberly Atkins, and Ibram Kendi will talk about a new joint project between Boston University and the Boston Globe, The Emancipator, a publication influenced by antislavery newspapers. Venkataraman and Kendi will also appear on Twitter Spaces at 3 PM to talk about how nineteenth-century abolitionist literature can inform today’s conversations about antiracism.
At the Washington Post, an oral history of the pandemic from independent bookstore owners.
In Public Books, professor Manu Samriti Chander looks at two new volumes, The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery by Matt Sanders, and considers the lies about enlightenment, freedom, and abolition that form the conventional narratives of the era. As Chander writes, “The books frustrate a desire to pay tribute to an abolitionist past by reminding us that abolition is unfinished, that it may be an eternal process.”
The 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalists have been announced, with 120 nominees in twenty-four categories. The winners will be presented at a free virtual event on June 1.
On Marc Lamont Hill’s Coffee and Books podcast, the host talks with Mariame Kaba about her new book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.